'Because no one was paying attention we could just put anything into the game,' says the writer responsible for sneaking The Lusty Argonian Maid into Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - An Oral History from the Game Developers - YouTube

Filmdeg Miniatures is a YouTube channel run by Tom Evans that is full of interviews with gaming luminaries. I know it mainly for unearthing Warhammer history on topics like the early editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Evans also covers videogames, most recently in an eight-hour oral history of Morrowind in which he lets a host of the classic weird-fantasy RPG's creators meander up and down memory lane as they discuss how it was made.

And he's also the one to blame for The Lusty Argonian Maid, a tiny joke text that's become a core part of the Elder Scrolls' identity. In a game full of serious books about history and theology and philosophy, it's delightful to stumble across one that's a silly sex comedy. "I don't even remember why I wrote it," Nelson admits in the interview. "It may have been after like a happy hour or something, quite honestly."

It may not even have made it to the finished product if Morrowind's project leader Todd Howard had noticed. "Because no one was paying attention we could just put anything into the game," Nelson says. "Todd's rule was always 'humor has no place in games.' That's Todd's rule. So of course that became 'humor has no place in games, if Todd doesn't catch it…' And that's where things like The Lusty Argonian Maid came in. I probably was like, I need a break, I've been scripting or creating something kind of boring. I'm gonna write a stupid little story."

While I don't expect everyone to have eight hours free to watch the entire video, it's handily timestamped in the description if you want to skip to a specific interview. The picture that emerges from seeing them all side by side is that Morrowind's existence is even more miraculous than you might already think, especially given how inexperienced the small team was.

"For probably half the people it was their first game," as Nelson says. "It was insane. That was a passion project. It shouldn't have gotten made. Like, it's stupid. It should never have gotten made, it shouldn't have been a success, but it was a really amazing combination of having the right people at the right time who were just willing to kill themselves to make this game."

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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